China Power | Diplomacy | East Asia

Trump, Xi Seek ‘New Chapter in China-US Relations’

There was a lot of grand talk about stabilizing the relationship, and few deliverables. 

U.S. President Donald Trump participates in a welcome ceremony with President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, May 14, 2026.

U.S. President Donald Trump made his long awaited trip to China this week, arriving in the country on May 13 and holding a bilateral meeting, as well as a state banquet, with China’s Xi Jinping on May 14. He will have tea and lunch with Xi on May 15 before departing for Washington. Trump’s visit marked the first by a U.S. president to China since 2017 – during Trump’s first term.

From Beijing, Trump and Xi promised a new era for the bilateral relationship. Xi even presented an entirely new formula: “building a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability.” According to the readout from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that means “positive stability with cooperation as the mainstay, healthy stability with competition within proper limits, constant stability with manageable differences, and lasting stability with expectable peace.”

Appealing to Trump’s desire to carve out a place for himself in the history books, Xi expressed interest in working with Trump to “make 2026 a historic, landmark year that opens up a new chapter in China-U.S. relations.”

Trump put it in simpler terms: “The relationship between China and the USA is going to be better than ever before.”

While Xi seemed intent on addressing the broad strokes of the relationship, Trump’s focus was narrower: trade and economic cooperation. Trump was accompanied by a bevy of CEOs from top American companies, including Apple, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Meta, Nvidia, Tesla, and Qualcomm. In a post on Truth Social before he landed in China, Trump said his “very first request” to Xi would be for China to “open up” to American companies represented by the CEOs. 

During the summit, Trump even paraded the CEOs before Xi and had them introduce themselves. He said that the business leaders were there to “pay their respects to you [Xi] and to China.” 

Several of these companies – particularly Nvidia and Qualcomm – are central to the China-U.S. competition in semiconductors and artificial intelligence. In fact, the U.S. government itself has put restrictions on their ability to sell cutting-edge technology to China. But there was no mention of those tensions during the meeting.

In fact, some of the U.S. talking points during the visit were oddly reminiscent of an earlier, simpler time in China-U.S. relations, when Washington still had hopes for fair market access and an appetite for large-scale Chinese investment. In a statement posted on Facebook, the White House said that Trump and Xi “discussed ways to enhance economic cooperation between our two countries, including expanding market access for American businesses into China and increasing Chinese investment into our industries.” That sentence would have fit right in during the Clinton and Bush administrations. 

More recently, Chinese investment began to be a point of contention, with many U.S. policymakers viewing Chinese funds with skepticism and seeking to wall off sensitive sectors from Chinese involvement. It’s been a long time since a U.S. president openly called for “increasing Chinese investment.” 

For all the focus on trade on the U.S. side, it wasn’t clear what Washington gained. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng held final preparatory talks on trade outcomes in South Korea on May 13. The specific outcomes of those talks, and the summit discussions, were not available as of writing. Instead, there was a vague mention of Chinese “interest in purchasing more American oil,” and Trump pushed for increased purchases of U.S. agricultural goods. Neither topic appeared in the Chinese readout, nor did cooperation on stemming flows of fentanyl – another U.S. priority.

China’s only mention of trade outcomes was to praise the “generally balanced and positive outcomes” of the Bessent-He talks, without elaborating on what, exactly, those outcomes were.

Rather than trade deals, Xi focused on the broad stokes of the relationship, hoping to set a tone of stable competition between equals. But he did have a warning for Trump on Taiwan: “The U.S. side must exercise extra caution in handling the Taiwan question… Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even........

© The Diplomat